The heated debate over San Francisco Unified’s required ethnic studies course is headed to court after an advocacy group alleged in a lawsuit filed this week that district officials violated public meeting laws when they approved and purchased a new curriculum for the class.
The Friends of Lowell Foundation, a nonprofit that advocates for the academically competitive Lowell High School as well as merit-based admissions and programs, filed the suit after first submitting a demand letter to the district calling for the reversal of the curriculum adoption. The school board, however, has stood by its vote for the off-the-shelf curriculum.
“This lawsuit is about process, because process is how the public keeps its schools accountable,” the organization said in a statement. “Parents were never told, in plain language, that the District was about to decide what every fourteen-year-old in this city would be taught.”
Ethnic studies, which focuses on marginalized peoples, has created controversy across the Bay Area in recent years amid a state law requiring a semester of the course for high school graduation — a mandate paused because of a lack of state funding to support it…